James Eastland

James Eastland (28 November 1904-19 February 1986) was a US senator from Mississippi from 30 June to 28 September 1941, succeeding Pat Harrison and preceding Wall Doxey, and again from 3 January 1943 to 27 December 1978, succeeding Doxey and preceding Thad Cochran.

Biography
James Eastland was born in Doddsville, Mississippi on 28 November 1904, and he graduated from the University of Alabama in 1927 before becoming a lawyer. From 1928 to 1932, Eastland served in the US House of Representatives as a southern Democrat. During the 1930s, Eastland owned a cotton plantation that employed several African-Americans as sharecroppers, and Eastland's life was similar to that of a white slaveholder during the 1850s. Eastland used poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses to prevent blacks from voting in his state, and he opposed many New Deal programs. During the 1950s and 1960s, Eastland showed his racism when he claimed that Brown v. Board of Education destroyed the US Constitution and when he denied that three civil rights workers were kidnapped by Ku Klux Klan members on 21 June 1964, telling President Lyndon B. Johnson that he thought that they had actually gone to Chicago, that their parents were pulling off a publicity stunt, and that the Klan did not exist in Mississippi. Eastland faced significant US Republican Party opposition during elections during the late 1960s and the 1970s as the US Democratic Party moved towards liberalism and the Republicans moved towards conservatism. Eastland refused to endorse 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern due to his hatred of liberalism, but he endorsed fellow Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter's 1976 presidential campaign. In 1978, he lost his senate seat to the Republican Thad Cochran, and he died in Doddsville in 1986 at the age of 81.